Not-Dying v Living
by Dalekwizard
Summary: Sequel to previous one-shots, Tony can't keep his mouth shut and Clint's awful but improving week. Companion piece to Bruce's one shot. Steve goes for a walk through the city...again.


Steve hated this place. The tower was filled with things that made no sense to him, and people who did the same. None of them realized it, of course, but when Clint told him to "Google it, it'll make a lot more sense," or Tony told him impatiently from something called a "remote access" (which meant he controlled Steve's computer without being physically present) that he needed to press control alt delete to get out of the thing he had pressed on that told him he won an iPod, whatever that was, he was more lost than when he had first met these people.

He had given up on the kitchen appliances. The toaster had more buttons than his computer.

Still, he enjoyed the people, and this was his life now. Tony made his toys in the labs upstairs, Bruce was shanghaied into helping, Natasha and Clint were constantly out in the city, getting to know Clint's new handler, he thought. He could be wrong. Once he would have sworn the SHIELD agents had left the building, only to see Clint dropping from an air shaft to steal Natasha's bacon and shimmying back into the vents. He hadn't known either one of them were there. Thor had left a week after, with his brother in tow.

Steve was usually left to his own devices. Sometimes Natasha came with him into the city and they walked around, her quiet, neutral voice answering his questions with no judgment. Steve had been awake for weeks before he met the Avengers and had explored New York when he could. Fury's people had given him packets and sheaves and reams of papers to read, all about the new world in which he found himself, but he was still adrift sometimes.

Clint came too, some days. Less often than Natasha, and they never came together, but the walks with Clint were fun. Clint took him to bowling alleys and pizzerias and curio shops. They headed into joke shops and movie theaters and they went to see a show at one point. Clint snuck popcorn in and critiqued the music.

For the least week, though, Steve had been alone, and this morning he wanted a bit of company. He had searched the tower before making himself a bowl of cereal, the simplest thing in the kitchen, and the two agents he tentatively considered friends weren't there. They must have already gone out into the city. Or they could be somewhere in the building. The point was that they didn't want to be found. He could respect that. They were dealing with their own loss. Coulson had been a good man. Clint spoke of him with grief, and Natasha didn't mention him at all. Steve wasn't sure which was dealing with their sorrow the best. But it wasn't really his place to judge, beyond his very nebulous position as team leader, so he left it alone. That's how he had dealt with his old team.

The pang in his heart when he thought of his old team hurt, badly, but not as badly as when he had woken to be told they were dead, to a one. Peggy, too. She had been an officer involved in the Cold War, assassinated in 1967 as a British Officer in the Malayan Insurgency. The last dance that he never had weighed in his mind, some days (most days), and he regretted his life now most fiercely. Still, there was nothing to be done, and Peggy would have roundly scolded him for moping.

So he was going to ask Dr. Banner to come with him today. It was his way of trying to live with the people and places of now.

He spotted the man as he slunk through the halls, hanging to the walls and keeping his eyes on the floor. Steve still had his cereal bowl in his hands; he tended to walk with it to keep busy, since paper newspapers were still a bit of an impossibility at the moment, due to the state of the city.

"Good morning Dr. Banner. I hope you had a pleasant evening." Dinner last night had been missing both the doctor and Tony. Tony was rarely there and Banner usually was. It had been Steve and Natasha and Clint, and Carson had stopped by later on, though he hadn't stayed. Steve wondered if the doctor even knew that, or if he had been too busy to notice.

"It was...alright, I guess; not anything to complain about. How was your run yesterday?" The doctor wasn't making eye contact, but he never did. The response was typical as well. He gave very passive answers to questions in general.

"It was good." And it had been. Jogging through the city was one of the most pleasant parts of his day. "A little odd, but it's getting better. I'm recognizing things, and I helped one of the construction crews again. Guy named Jefferson says hi; you were out with them the other day, I guess." Jefferson had nothing but good things to say about the doctor, spoken over lifting rubble that it usually took whole crews to move. It was odd, however, that he doctor was out and about in the city, interacting with people. The doctor seemed to think they were very fragile and that he would turn into the Hulk at the drop of a hammer. It wasn't Steve's place to say, but he rather thought the doctor underestimated the beast's understanding of the world.

"They were working on Third Avenue." Oh. Of course. Banner was cleaning up his mess. Steve could appreciate that.

Here it went. "I was wondering if you wanted to go to the movies today? I know there's a few places that are still open." He knew the attempt had failed when the doctor looked at him regretfully. _Lots of things to regret nowadays._ Steve quashed that thought firmly.

"I can't. I have some things running in my lab that absolutely have to be monitored today, or-" He broke off, grimacing. Steve was nodding before the man was done, hiding the tired resignation that had swept through him. It was just one day, but sometimes it felt like his life was like that, him reaching out, only to be rebuffed.

"I get it. No problem." Bruce looked unhappy at that response, but Steve didn't know why. It really wasn't a huge thing, nothing to get worked up over.

By the time he left the tower, Steve was feeling pretty blue, though he guessed it wasn't called feeling blue, now. He didn't feel up to going to the movies on his own, so he wandered around until one of the omnipresent construction crews called for help. He jogged over and pulled the masonry out of the broken crane with the rest of the crew and set to work. This was how most of his walks ended anyway. He and Natasha or He and Clint or just he would stop and spend hours helping to rebuild the city the brother of one of their own and themselves had destroyed. He had plenty of practice.

He worked companionably for a while with the group of men and women, trying to at least make the apartment easily accessible from the street. The sun shined down on the crew and he started to sweat. It was a good sweat, one that meant he had done good work. It was a familiar feeling.

He was daydreaming a bit as he worked, so the cry of "Head's up!" Jolted him from his reverie abruptly. He looked up sharply. Above them, on the apartment building itself, someone had sent a hunk of stone careening off the edge. It was gaining momentum and was on its way toward Steve and his crew. Everyone had gotten out of the way but for Steve and one man. Steve grabbed his arm and hauled him bodily out of the way. The slam of the stone into the rubble of the street was _loud_, and Steve's ears were ringing – it had hit only a few feet away.

The man pulled out of the way turned toward his savior and grinned. "How about that, mate? That would've been messy." His accent reminded the captain of Peggy, but the mischief sparkling in his eye reminded him more of Tony. "Thanks. Name's Black, and it's a pleasure to have been saved by the Great Captain America!" Steve winced. Dear lord, he could _hear_ the capital letters in that sentence.

"You can call me Steve," the captain said hurriedly.

"Yeah, I'd expect you to not be named Captain America at birth. Bloody awful thought."

"At least my mother didn't name me a color." Steve said it primly, a bit miffed that this man felt it was his prerogative to mock his name.

Black's eyebrows waggled suggestively. "She didn't, but she did name me after a star. It's why I go as Black. Better than a star. My family was a bit...pretentious." Steve grinned at him. The man's teasing apparently targeted anyone in the area, including himself.

"Was?" It occurred to Steve too late that it might be a bad question to ask, especially with the deaths caused by Loki's army. But Black didn't seem to mind.

"Yep. Was. They're all dead now, every Black bearing the name in existence. No loss. Probably a good thing, mostly." He was cheerful, until that last. Then he put his chunk of stone down in its pile and pursed his lips thoughtfully at it. "Maybe not Reggie. But he was a wanker too, just on the right side. So yeah, mostly good."

Steve almost didn't want to ask, but he was curious and the man seemed to have no compunctions with sharing. "Right side?"

"Oh yeah, bloody tiny war with a terrorist. He was a lot like Hitler. Blood supremacy and all that. Nowhere near the scale. My family was on the wrong side. Morally and in terms of winning. They lost. I lost years of my life to that war, though. Missed out on a lot." He threw this rock down with a bit more force than necessary. "Missed my godson growing up."

Steve winced empathetically. He hadn't missed anyone growing up, but he had missed his parents' deaths and his generation. He understood.

"I'm sorry." He offered it knowing the words were never really enough, but had to be offered anyway. Black grinned at him, melancholy forgotten.

"Over and done with now, mate, and hey, how about that god of tricksters running around? That's something you don't see every day. Only on weekends." His eyebrows waggled again, enjoying his terrible joke. Steve surveyed him sideways for a moment before he had to laugh. This man seemed to enjoy life. Steve could follow his example for today.

They were still working a half hour later, chatting and grinning, when Black stopped his joke about a black dog and a pink toad and looked over Steve's shoulder. He smirked. "Looks like that doctor you told me about made it out of the lab." Steve felt his face light up as he turned around.

The doc had made it out! He knew it was a struggle for Banner to leave his isolation, and he also knew the man's experiments could have kept him for a long time. An emotion stirred in his chest and it took a moment to identify it as pride. This was a member of _his_ team overcoming a personal obstacle.

"Doctor Banner! I thought you had to go to the lab."

"I've told you, Steve, it's Bruce. And I'll have time to do them later. We're on vacation. I thought you were going to the movies." He had forgotten about that.

"I was, but Black and I got to talking and I decided to stay and help." Steve looked around for Black, but he couldn't find him in the teeming, industrious mass of workers. "He must have gone to another project."

Bann- No, Bruce, was grinning at him. "I have time to help. What can I do?"

They worked for a long time, well past lunch, taken with the workers. People in the apartments came out of their homes with sandwiches and bagged lunches for the people helping them. Steve had three, and the crew laughed at him for it. He was unrepentant, and Bruce laughed.

By the time they returned to the tower, the sun was sinking. They walked in to Tony yelling about Dummy not being able to find any cultures and Jarvis swearing that no one had entered or exited the tower. Steve looked at Bruce questioningly, not having a clue what was going on. Bruce was wearing a resigned grin. So it was business as usual. When Bruce went to his lab to see about the missing cultures, Steve tagged along. He hadn't been in here before. It was like any other lab, really, except for the candy in the dish on the desk. He picked one up and ate it absentmindedly as he walked around.

Bruce's quiet panic over the missing, dangerous cultures was interrupted a minute later by a large red, white and blue bird squawking awkwardly around the room.

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A/N: The Malayan Emergency where I had Peggy meet her end was a war between Britain and Malaya. In June 1948, Malayans killed British plantation managers, and the communist party, according to Soviet goals, went on the offensive. They had support from the local populace, and so the local populace was removed to "New Villages". Many resented this, but the living conditions were an improvement over their original state, and they were able to keep their land.

In '51, Gurney, the High Commissioner of the British forces, was murdered. His murder turned public opinion toward the British.

In '52, a man named Gerald Templer took command of the British forces. His policies are widely credited with turning the war in favor of the British. In total, the war involved 40,000 British military and 6-8,000 communists.

The communists were defeated in the late fifties, but the Emergency wasn't officially declared over until 1960. There was a resurgence of the guerillas in 1967, and they were defeated again, though it took more than 20 years, until 1989, to do it.

The country was renamed Malaysia.


End file.
